Going to the Art Gallery in Piccadilly Gardens in 1929 ........ the one we never got

Now what do you do with a big hole in the ground in the centre of Manchester?

Today of course it would be sold for development and pretty soon a tall less than elegant tower would fill the spot “offering a mix of commercial and residential opportunities for our times.”

But not so in the early decades of the last century when the Corporation decided to do something bold and innovative with the hole that was the Manchester Infirmary and is now Piccadilly Gardens.

There were plenty of suggestions including plans for an art gallery these never happened.

I must admit I never followed up on the art gallery project so I was pleased when my friend Neil Simpson sent me a picture of the proposed new gallery along with a description from How Manchester is Managed which were issued yearly by the City Council and described what they did.

The books are a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the history of the City.   I plundered them back in the early 1970s but had since pretty much forgotten about them.

So Neil’s discovery reunited me with an old set of friends and in the 1935 edition was this article on the new proposed art gallery.

The Corporation was well aware that “the space available in the Central Gallery had become overcrowded and great difficulty was experienced in finding accommodation for displaying the treasures to advantage,”*

And so having purchased the old Infirmary site in 1918 the “City Council concurred in the views expressed by the Art Gallery Committee that the site was the best place for the New Gallery.”

In 1925 after an open competition had been launched the design by Mr. E. Berry Webber was selected.  He was “29 years old, has designed a building which in all essentials admirably fulfil its functions as a Gallery and Museum of Applied Art and will at the same time , be a building in which the public can see what is to be seen easily and methodically. “

It was to be a building “in which clarity of design is essential [and one which] with its simple and dignified elevation and its freedom from irrelevant ornament will look what it is namely a, a place for the exhibition and study of Art.”

But it never happened.

The financial crash in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression meant that on grounds of economy the City Council took the decision in 1931 to defer its construction for five years.

Picture; the proposed new Art Gallery, 1935 from How Manchester is Managed, Manchester City Council, 1935, page 73

*How Manchester is Managed, Manchester City Council, 1935, pages 72-73

The lost building on Barlow Moor Road ……….

No matter how much you uncover about the story of Chorlton, there is always something new.

1927

So, a while ago Kelsey Broome sent me a photograph of the old Royal Oak on Barlow Moor Road, which I had never seen before.

The pub dates from the early 19th century and was demolished sometime in the 1920s for the Royal Oak we know today.

This much I knew, but had never been able to pin down exactly when this happened.

I had always thought it must be in the late 1920s, and after a tour of the upstairs began to think it might have crossed over into the next decade.

But as so often happens a new bit of the jigsaw falls into place, which in this case was delivered by Bill Sumner, who provided me with this aerial picture of the new Royal Oak, with the magic date of 1927, which narrows down its construction.

1907

More so because there had been efforts during the early 20th century to get permission to replace the old pub with a new one.

But Bill’s picture just threw up another mystery which is the large building to right of the pub, behind the bank.

It is a substantial building, which is absent from the OS map of 1907, and has disappeared by 1952.

At present the only clue might be a reference in 1911 to a Frank Johnson at 21a Barlow Moor Road, who was a furniture dealer.

But that is it, and I will have to wait till I can get into Central Ref and look through the directories for the period from 1911 through to 1952 which might just of up some answers.

That said someone might know.

We shall see.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Barlow Moor Road, 1927, Britain from the Air, EPWO, 17618, detail from the OS map of Manchester, 1907

The ship …….. a lighter …. and the River

Now I am the first to admit as pictures go these might not be the ones to enter for “The most exciting picture of the century”, but they are over 40 years old and come from a time when the Thames was still a working river.

I had wandered down to Greenwich looking for the old food factory where I had worked at the beginning of the 1970s.

It was called Glenvilles and was close the Tunnel, and along the way I decided to record whatever took my interest.

Just exactly where along the water I was I can’t now remember, but in the second image there are the silos of what I think were Tunnel Refineries, which after the passage of four decades  is as close as you will get to a location

Happily I am sure someone will correct me, citing the exact spot and adding heaps more detail.

Well we shall see.

And here is the reminder that we should all record the place, date and a bit of background information each time we go out with a camera.

Leaving me just to say that before anyone sneers at the quality of the images, they were taken when I was just beginning to develop and print my own photographs, using smelly photography and the negatives have sat in the cellar for 40 years.

Location; The River

Picture; The ship …….. a barge …. and the River, circa 1978/79 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Walking with history …….. Bucatini Cacio e Pepe

It is one of the obvious observations that some of the simplest of dishes remain both fun to make and above all are totally delicious.

Bucatini Cacio e Pepe

So, it is with Bucatini Cacio e Pepe which combines my favourite pasta with cheese and pepper.

I have been making a variation for over forty years mixing pasta with olive oil, grated pecorino cheese and heaps of black pepper.

Our kids all grew up with it and will still opt for it as an alternative to chilli and garlic pasta.

But I had never tried the equally simple and quick Bucatini Cacio e Pepe.  

One source records that it originates with Italian shepherds who wanted something quick to make while out in the fields and originates in the region of Lazio.

And it is quick, only requiring you to cook the pasta mix it  to a bowl of grated pecorino and add a quantity of the pasta water which forms the sauce and then finish off with as much black pepper as you want.  

Three ingredients made in the time it takes to cook the pasta.

That said maybe I didn’t use enough cheese because the sauce was not as gooey as I suspect it should have been, but it was a first attempt.  

On the other hand, I might just revert to the even simpler pasta, olive oil, cheese and pepper.

The dish will be centuries old and reflects that basic peasant cooking which does the best with the minimum.

Ingredients for Spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino

And that will also explain Spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino, or Spaghetti with garlic, oil and chilli.

Now my Silver Spoon Cookbook says I should just fry the garlic and chillies in some olive oil and add the spaghetti by pulling the pasta out with a fork rather than draining it which keeps the pasta moist and just softens the dish.*

As a variation I prefer using linguini and throw in just enough tomato sauce to add a bit of extra colour. 

At which point purists will sniffily point out that I have wandered into making Spaghetti All’ Amatriciana, which blends my chilli, garlic and tomato mix with diced pancetta, which is close, but as a vegetarian would never include meat.

A variation on Spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino

But then this Neapolitan dish like all peasant meals will change slightly depending on what ingredients are available and on the preferences of the cook.

So, with that in mind tomorrow I may look at what exists in the cupboard and the fridge to ring the changes on these two basic friends.

Location; our kitchen

Pictures; wot I cooked, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

 *The Silver Spoon, 2005, 2000 Italian recipes

How we lived and what we did in 1938

I am back with that slim book which celebrated 100 years of civic achievement here in Manchester.

Your City, Manchester 1838-1938 was written by "the Manchester Municipal Officer’s Guild in co-operation with its Group for Research in Administration and Sociology in celebration of the Centenary of the City’s Charter of Incorporation, with special dedication to the Children of Manchester.” 

Of course when it was published it was the story of what the council had achieved in the century we had had locally elected government.

So there were chapters on the improvements in sanitation, public health, education and housing, as well as leisure, and culture, town planning and the government of the city.

And it looked forward to the future, with clean and cheap electricity and gas, heating and lighting the homes across the city as well as fuelling the domestic appliances for cooking and washing.

All of which makes it a remarkable document, because you can read it as people back then did, marvelling at what one hundred years of municipal endeavour had achieved or treat it as a  bit of a historical record.  After all 75 years have passed since its publication and some of what it describes are themselves distant memories.

The uniforms of the police and their role in traffic management have changed, as has the way our household refuse is collected.  You have to be well into the middle years of your life to remember a dust cart like this or that rubbish was deposited in metal dustbins.

My particular favourite is the Sludge Steamship Mancunium which took the treated sewage waste out to sea where it was “emptied into the ocean 22 miles beyond Liverpool or [that] portion broadcast,was broadcast on to the  land and ploughed in helping to make the land good for agricultural purposes.”

Not so different then from the practice of our own farmers who bought night soil from the privies of Manchester to spread across the township fields.

As for household rubbish the book makes much of the slogan on the side of dust carts of the period to “Burn your own rubbish.”

Now given the number of open fire this was a practical solution and by extension the Corporation did much the same in its destructors, which “are really big furnaces ..... where cart loads of rubbish are burned down to clinkers, the useful parts of the rubbish – old tins, bottles, etc- being saved and sold to firms who melt them down and use them for making new tins and new bottles.”

Less attractive today but at the time lauded as the new and scientific way was “'controlled tipping'.  Here the rubbish is dumped on low lying land and is spread carefully out and ‘sealed’ by covering with a thick layer of soil. 

Then another layer of waste in put on top, ‘sealed’ and so the land is built up into what becomes in a year or two solid land.  

Just as the clinker obtained from the incineration method is put to good use in road making, the controlled tipping method is usefully applied to filling up waste land, and as you will find on the Mersey Bank at Wythenshawe that a large area of waste land previously liable to floods has been built up by this method into high solid land, grass-grown and suitable for all sorts of purposes, such as playing fields and parks...”

And that I suppose is where I part company with the civic achievements because that neat new scientific solution ruined the meadows between our village and the Mersey.  What had been an area of carefully cultivated meadow land became a dumping ground which raised the level of the land and destroyed for ever a unique way of farming.

And before anyone claims that this has prevented flooding close to Chorlton I would just remind them that this was our flood plain which generations had quite happily accepted as the price paid for living close to the river.

But that is not quite the end.  That refuse deposited here 70 or so years ago is still there and may not have gone away.  Just a few years ago my old botanist friend came across a newspaper from 1938 in perfect condition out on the Stretford side of the river.  It appears to have been unearthed by people digging for old bottles or some other ancient treasure.

What was remarkable was that it was in perfect condition which begs the question of what else sits below the surface?  A question which the more sober, dispassionate and scientific readers will be able to answer.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; from Your City, Manchester 1838-1938, the Manchester Municipal Officer’s Guild, 1938

Hailing a cab in Chorlton in the 1920s

Charles Croton was one of our taxi drivers and successful enough to have moved from horse and cab to motor vehicle by the 1920s and was listed in the telephone book by 1911.

All of which makes him a suitable candidate for a story.

He was another of those new people who moved in to Chorlton just as the place was expanding.  He had been born in London in 1867 and his father was also a hackney coach driver.

His earlier years are a little murky but I know he married Ann in 1887 and their first child was born two years later.  These were the years when they seemed to move about the country. Some of the children were born in Hulme but others in Littlemore in Oxfordshire, but by 1901 they were settled here in Chorlton on Sandy Lane.

So this makes them a perfect example of the families who moved here to take advantage of the new housing development which was going up mainly along Barlow Moor, Wilbraham and Manchester Roads and the areas off in each direction.

These were the middling people who mostly earned a living by working as office workers and professionals in the city taking advantage of the new railway which could whisk commuters into Manchester in under fifteen minutes.  But there were also more wealthy families who owned businesses as well as skilled semi skilled and manual workers who lived in the six shilling a week houses.

The Croton’s however occupied what had been a farm house and here the attraction may well have been the yard where the taxi could be kept as well as the close proximity to Shaw’s motor garage and petrol pump on Barlow Moor Road.

And in other ways they reflect this new Chorlton with all four of the children entering the new trades.  So while Reg the eldest followed his father into the cab trade, was an engineer in the Corporation electrical works and both daughter worked as shop assistants, one in confectionary and the other in drapery.

Charles died in the summer of 1926 but the business continued into the 1930s still on Sandy Lane.  Which takes me back to Reg.  The picture was taken in 1922 which would have made him thirty years old.  He is parked up in the station I guess waiting for the arrival of a train and a potential fare.

So there you have it, a little bit about one of our families.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

Pinching pictures ……ever acceptable?

It will have been sometime in the summer of 1979 when I wandered back to the Cutty Sark on Ballast Quay.

Ballast Quay, 1979

A decade earlier the pub had been one of our regular haunts.

Even now the memory of sitting on that low wall on warm evenings with the powerful smell of the River and listening as the boats banged together from the swell of a passing pleasure cruiser is still magic undimmed by the passage of nearly sixty years.

And as you do the first  picture has featured over time in my stories about the pub, Greenwich and the changes to the area.

Ballast Quay, 2022

So, I shouldn’t be surprised that "the man, the power station and the pub" should turn up on a social media site.

What I am not so happy about is that it was posted with no acknowledgement to me who took it or a date.

And that at best diminishes its value as a piece of history and ignores its ownership.

Without a date there is no context, no understanding of the place in the story of Greenwich and it becomes just a picture with little significance.

As such it is useless to a casual observer or the historian.

But a date places it in its time and allows you to draw conclusions about what the place was like in 1979.

More so when standing at roughly the same point in 2022 as recorded by Google Maps.

The advent of AI has in certain circumstances challenged our perception that what you see is really what it is.

So a date and source helps validate the image and I think makes it a more useful window on the past.

Added to which just lifting or more realistically pinching it does nothing for the person who created it.

Ah I hear you mutter, "it’s just the internet, its there so its fair game", but it’s not because if you adopt that attitude, it could be a parked bike standing outside the sweet shop …. "it’s there so it is ok to take it away".

But that would be pinching.

And for many their pictures or their research is their livelihood, and reflects their skill and talent, which is not served by picking it up at random and plonking down in an inappropriate place.

Now I make no great claims about my photograph but it is mine, and courtesy alone demands that I am credited.

But at least Peter the Pincher didn’t choose to crop the image which might totally distort the story behind the photograph.

Before I cropped my picture, 1979

In this case I did that.  

And I did so because I wanted just "the man, the power station and the pub", and that was my choice, but because both images are out there it is possible for people to assess them both.

Fair is fair.

Location; Ballast Quay, 

Pictures;  the man, the power station and the pub, ; Ballast Quay, Greenwich 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Ballast Quat, 2022, courtesy of Google Maps